A priceless privilege

Telegraph View: Sir Fred Goodwin cannot get the better of one ancient
freedom.

Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin, who presided over the near-collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, retired on an annual pension of £342,000 and also received a lump sum of almost £3 million. We have no idea whether he used any of this cash for legal fees to obtain a secret super-injunction banning the publication of information about him. But if it did cost him a lot of money, he must be regretting it. For, although the court granted Sir Fred’s wish, this week a Liberal Democrat MP revealed in Parliament one of the things the injunction was supposed to conceal: the very fact of its existence.

Given their extreme nature and the public controversy that they engender, super-injunctions do not seem to be particularly hard to obtain. Over the past few years, British courts have been strangely eager to grant these gagging orders, whose basis lies in human rights legislation inspired by Europe. It is hard to avoid the view that judges are forging a privacy law on the hoof.

Fortunately, there is one thing that trumps the “human right” to silence a free press, and that is the legal privilege of MPs to say anything they like in Parliament, which dates back to the Civil War. Secret super-injunctions are, in theory, extremely powerful instruments – but, thanks to that ancient freedom, this particular one lies in shreds.